Kurt Nordback: Make ADUs easier to create in Boulder

The divide in Boulder over how to address our ongoing housing crisis is as stark as ever, but nearly everyone can agree that the trend of scraping existing houses and building new, larger, more expensive houses is lamentable. This gentrification drives up housing costs, destroys embodied energy, and adds no net housing. It mainly benefits the wealthy, while every house scraped is one less that might be affordable to middle-income folks struggling to afford to live in the city.

Thankfully, tools are available to us to discourage or penalize this gentrification. Boulder limits the size of new houses based on lot size, and this is a good start, though it doesn't take much looking at new construction to see the limits are overly generous. But there's another tool: smart policy on accessory dwelling units (ADUs), especially the detached kind, sometimes called backyard cottages.

How do detached ADUs prevent scrapes? By giving property owners an avenue to add value on a lot without building a giant single-family house, they reduce the incentive to demolish existing houses. And because -— this is key — an ADU counts against the allowable building size on a lot, once an ADU is built, only a smaller house is then permissible on the lot. A bigger ADU means a smaller house, and no ADU means the biggest house.

I'll use an example that's close to home. Actually, it is my home. My wife and I live in a house built in 1962 that by the city's calculations (not including basement) is about 1,200 square feet. It's a perfectly fine house but far from luxury, and ones like it get demolished regularly around our neighborhood, to be replaced by ultra-high-end houses. It's easy to see why: On our lot a 3,350-square-foot house is permitted by code. In other words, scraping and rebuilding would allow for a house that's over 2,000 square feet bigger. That's a powerful incentive.

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But now imagine that we had an 800-square-foot detached ADU. Then the allowable house size would be 2,550 square feet, about 1,300 square feet bigger than our current house. That's still a big increase, but it may not make it worth demolishing an existing, functional house. The incentive to scrape would be much less.

If this example doesn't convince you, maybe the experts will. Seattle recently released a study of ADUs that found the same general result: ADUs help prevent gentrification by scrapes. Its report says that "... a tradeoff is occurring between adding an ADU and tearing down and rebuilding a house," and that policy options that encourage ADUs "could increase the feasibility of keeping the existing house compared to (the status quo)" — a status quo that's already significantly friendlier to ADUs than Boulder's rules.

Unfortunately, Boulder city council is now veering from a staff plan towards rules that are less friendly to ADUs. A proposal would give homeowners two options: create a small ADU, probably too small for a family, and face restrictive parking requirements; or sign a permanent deed restriction limiting the rent on the ADU. Faced with this choice, many homeowners will take the third option: not creating an ADU at all. That means more scrapes and huge new houses, higher housing prices, and more traffic and pollution from people commuting to Boulder.

Trying to improve affordability through restrictions on ADUs is akin to saying cars pollute too much so we should improve the fuel efficiency of Priuses. The city's own statistics show that ADUs are naturally affordable, and they attract middle-income people like teachers, nurses, and city workers. That's not surprising. A hedge-fund manager or tech IPO millionaire isn't going to be interested in living in someone's basement or backyard.

Instead of restricting ADUs we should be encouraging them. We should make it easy and attractive to create ADUs, with the minimum of hurdles, and then we should go further. We should require that if a house is scraped, what's built to replace it must include an ADU. We should allow every house in Boulder to have one internal and one external ADU. These would be positive steps toward reducing scrapes and gentrification in Boulder.

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